| Genesis Twenty-two: Genesis Twenty-two, The Binding of Isaac: A Story Without Words
A Signed, Limited-Edition Print by David Moss
This print was originally designed as a mural in the Akiba Academy on the Schultz Rosenberg Campus in Dallas. The building of this campus was a dream project for me. I spent more than two years working with a warm, generous and truly remarkable group of people. They kindly gave me the opportunity to imagine how my method of doing Jewish art could be applied to an entire school campus of seven buildings.
I was involved from the very day the architects were engaged, through to when the school opened. I was able to help consider everything – from the way in which the layout of buildings on the campus could reflect their ideology, to the form of the individual buildings, to the landscaping, and down to the finest details of the interior art program.
I created this piece as a 45-foot canvas mural in three sections running down the entire wall of the central hall of the primary school. I created the original design as a collage using cut, colored papers. This was then scanned and refined to create the mural, as well as this gicl×™e print.
I had long been fascinated with and delighted by the wordless novels of Frans Masereel before 1920, Lynd Ward in the late 1920s and 1930s, and Otto Nuckel around 1930. These powerful, full-length books, done as woodcuts or wood engravings and printed in strongly contrasting black and white, were certainly an influence on this present work.
But the most direct spur to this piece came during the period I was working on the school. I was lecturing in Florida. A lovely gentleman came up to me and reintroduced himself as Arthur Jaffe. He gave me his card that said, “The Arthur and Matilda Library of Books as Aesthetic Objects.†This intrigued me, since I try to make books as aesthetic objects as well.
Indeed, Mr. Jaffe informed me that he collected my books for his library and owned one of the facsimile editions of my haggadah, which he showed all the time. He also invited me to the library the next day, when he was doing a showing to a couple of classes of inner city students. I went and was blown away. It is an absolutely stunning collection and an amazing life's work. I go back every time I'm anywhere near Boca Raton, and insist that anyone I know going to South Florida visit to this unique library.
This piece is a direct result of that first visit, and an homage to the artist of one of the little books I saw for a just a few seconds that day. It was a fairy tale made as a little folding book by the Swiss artist Warja Lavater. During the sixties, she published a number fairy tale books, done entirely with colorful images. I was captivated and charmed by the simplicity, elegant design, and power of these simple images to convey a story.
For the mural, I decided to try my hand at a wordless retelling of a biblical story. I chose the mysterious, elevating, haunting, and frightening tale of the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. It is a foundation story of our people – a token of our absolute commitment to God and a token of God’s absolute commitment to us. It’s a magical, elemental story with a pulsating rhythm that attracts, fascinates, rivets, scares, and enchants children and adults.
This story is also one of the few biblical narratives with an ancient history in Jewish visual art. Examples have been unearthed on the walls of the third century synagogue at Dura Europos in Syria, and in mosaics on the floors of Byzantine synagogues in Israel. I was working in a Jewish artistic tradition stretching back at least 1,800 years.
I chose an approach somewhat different from Lavater’s both in the way I made the correspondence between concepts and images, and the way I presented the flow of the story. I extracted the ten key elements of the story and assigned a specific color to each one:
God is Blue
Time is Yellow
Abraham is White – a kabbalistic correspondence
Isaac is Red – also influenced by kabbalah
Other humans, the servants, etc. are a Yellow Orange
The Animals are Gray
The Plants are Green
Fire is Orange
The Knife is Black
And Earth is a Dark Reddish Brown
Unlike Lavater, I made no attempt to make a correspondence to shape or form of the elements. Those I would let change freely as the story demanded. I also chose to represent the pulsating, musical rhythm of the story by using distinct groupings of images, one following the other, very much as I heard the perfect phrasing of the Hebrew that slowly, inexorably builds the power of the story.
My decision to ignore any correspondence to shape for the elements allowed me interesting ways to subtly comment on the story.
In verse 5, Abraham tells his servants that “I and the lad will go there and we will prostrate ourselves and we will return to you.†Who is the “we†that will return? I've shown Abraham returning indeed, but Isaac is merely a trace of a possibility of a shadow.
The horn of the ram in Isaac’s heart-piercing question in verse 8, itself becomes a poignant question mark. “Here is the fire and here is the wood, but where is the ram for the sacrifice?â€
After this question, Isaac, up till now portrayed in sharp rectilinear lines, himself becomes slightly curved like the horns of the ram he does not see, but may become.
For me, the denouement of the story is verse 18, as God promises Abraham:
“And through your seed shall all the peoples of the earth be blessed for you have listened to My voice.â€
These nine Hebrew words constitute an eternal mission for the Jewish people. They are at the same time a blessing and a charge, an honor and a duty, a promise and a hope. This verse became the mandela-like image in the story. It was later produced as a separate, large art print to be used as a gift to donors and as a fund-raiser for the school.
Only much later did I realize that it almost perfectly reflected one of the very first things I suggested for the layout of the campus. The round Bet Midrash, representing the place of Torah, the word of God, sits firmly in the center of the campus. All the other buildings surround it with meaningful gaps between them. These represent the school’s commitment to be centered in Judaism and Torah, but open to bringing in the best of the outside world and especially to carry the best of Torah out to the entire surrounding community. This is exactly the message of verse 18.
The delight in this piece came just before I was about to take it off to Dallas and present the idea to the committee. Before I did, I wanted to first test it out on a child. I decided to show the model collage to our seven-year old granddaughter, Hallel. Our whole family was gathered together. We spread out the long piece on our dining room table, and I proceeded to tell her the story as I pointed to each image in turn. She listened carefully as her eyes took in each picture. I could see she was transfixed. When I reached the very end, I turned the whole thing back to the beginning and said, “Now you tell it to us, Hallel.†Without a minute's hesitation she proceeded to recite the entire story, word for word, pointing to the images as she went. She missed nothing. We were all stunned.
I knew then that this piece would do exactly what I wanted it to: empower children to master the mystery of a story without words, and to be able to translate it through their own words to others.
It is my hope that the children of the Akiba Academy in Dallas, and all the children who see these prints, will become the docents of these few but powerful words of Torah to their friends, their parents and to “all the peoples of the earth.â€
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